On this
page we provide information about the research project "Parliamentary
Control of Security Policy" (paks) at the
Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.

In
2003 several of the then 25
member and accession states of the European Union (EU-25) actively
participated in the US-led war against Iraq, despite strong public opposition (see
EOS-Gallup
Europe's International Crisis Survey of January 2003.This
contradicts the (monadic) theory of democratic peace originating from
Kant, which expects war-averse public majorities to be able to use
democratic institutions to effectively constrain their government’s
security policy.

We think that in order to be able to solve the puzzle of the
expected general peacefulness of democracies we should "unpack" the
independent variable "democracy". Research on the democratic peace so
far is based on democracy as a homogeneous category. If political
systems meet certain minimum requirements – such as free and fair
elections, alternating governments, public transparency of political
decision-making, and the rule of law – they are counted as democracies.
At this point, the democratic quality of security policy and military
deployment decisions is beyond consideration. Therefore, it might be
the case that a political system meets the general criteria for being
counted as a democracy, even if the government enjoys exclusive
decision-making powers on military security issues without being
restricted by democratic checks and balances.

In our research project on the "Parliamentary control of military
security policy" (paks) we focused on the case of 25 national
parliaments and their impact on national security policies relating to
the 2003 Iraq war. We operationalized democratization of security
policy-making as parliamentarization. Given that legislatures are
responsive to war-averse citizens we tested the hypothesis that
depending on their powers in security policy-making, parliaments
effectively limit the
scope of executive security policy. In the first part of the project we
developed two typologies to measure, first, the powers of parliaments
regarding matters of military security policy (paks "war powers"
typology) and, second, the involvement of the EU-25 governments in the
Iraq war (paks "war involvement" typology). In the second part of the
project we collected data for both parliamentary
"war powers" and the war involvement of the 25 European democracies of
our sample. At the end of the project, we correlated the two datasets
and discussed the findings.

We conducted the research from February 2006 to October 2007.
Research results can be downloaded as paks working papers. We are
planning a follow-up project ("paks II) on decision-making
processes in selected national parliaments adding the
"attitude" dimension to the "authority" dimension of the "parliamentary
peace".